


hope that we'll rise like the sun will do

by ineachandeveryway



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alchemy Musings, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Resembool Trio Focused, With Edwin Implications
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 15:54:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26800216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ineachandeveryway/pseuds/ineachandeveryway
Summary: The image of Ed and Al sitting across from her at the dining table earlier is etched into her mind, and it’s a complicated thing. The pair of them looked as if they were filled to bursting with information they weren’t quite sure how to properly parse; like lost boys who had followed a map but didn’t know how to recognize the destination, because they had almost never expected to reach it./ Or, Ed and Al come back, and Winry finally has a chance to take them in, invisible scars and all.
Relationships: Alphonse Elric & Edward Elric & Winry Rockbell, Edward Elric/Winry Rockbell
Comments: 13
Kudos: 55





	hope that we'll rise like the sun will do

**Author's Note:**

> In wanting to put out something sweet for the special occasion, I instead created a sort of monster. There are a plethora of ideas packed into this wee little fic, and rather than try to explain them beforehand, I'll let them come at you as you read (this is not meant to be read as a threat, I promise). Also, a huge, huge amount of thanks to Amy, for beta-ing this for me on such short notice! Her fics are over at [coerulus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coerulus), so do check them out! 
> 
> Title is taken from ["Hope"](https://genius.com/Tom-rosenthal-hope-lyrics) by Tom Rosenthal. As always, comments are appreciated, and I hope you enjoy!

Winry doesn’t find out that Al is still an insomniac until the night after they come back. 

It’s late into maintenance hours, and she sits at her work table, making final adjustments to an arm due for delivery in the morning. The image of Ed and Al sitting across from her at the dining table earlier is etched into her mind, and it’s a complicated thing. The pair of them looked as if they were filled to bursting with information they weren’t quite sure how to properly parse; like lost boys who had followed a map but didn’t know how to recognize the destination, because they had almost never expected to reach it. 

And there are truths that Ed and Al never told her, on account of danger, or not having enough time to spare, or some other excuse they could come up with in the moment. But now, things are different, and suddenly, they have all the time left in the world to dwell on trauma shared among the three of them, somehow separated over paths they each charted in different directions. 

Winry walks into Al’s room after her work on the arm is finished, hoping for a glimpse of serenity she hasn’t seen in years, and when she finds Ed bent over his body, fast asleep, what enters her head instead are more questions. 

“Hey,” she murmurs, fingers grazing his shoulder just enough to make him stir. Ed’s eyelids flutter, and he turns to face her, dark circles under his eyes made apparent by moonlight. His brow pinches in a frown, and he rubs the back of his neck before asking aloud, “What time is it?”

Al doesn’t even move. 

The covers are pulled up to his neck, with the exception of one hand hanging outside of their reach to tangle with Ed’s. The sound of the shutters rattling permeates the room, and as Winry quietly answers, “Four,” he doesn’t so much as stir. Her fingers stray to his face, to the gaunt cheekbones, and the skin under feels cold, as if he’s a dead body. 

Ed moves her hand away from Al’s face and clasps it in his own, startling her, before motioning for them to leave the room. An urgent deluge of questions sits on her tongue, desperate to be spilled, but he tugs her away from the scene just as insistently, only bothering to face her when they’ve made their way downstairs and into the kitchen. The look on his face is stressed, a bit haggard, and Winry wonders now how she didn’t see it before when they arrived. Maybe the euphoria washed all of the stress lines over. 

_There’s something wrong with him,_ she doesn’t want to say, because for the last five years, something _has_ been wrong with him. To add onto that original life sentence, especially in the face of its maker, feels cruel, even on her part. Instead, Winry waits silently for Ed to find the right words, sifting through the cupboards for something to make tea in. 

“He can’t sleep,” he says finally, when she’s got water boiling on the stove. It’s a simple admission, and she doesn’t understand, but she tries to, before prodding. 

“How often?” she asks. 

Ed answers, “Every night.” He runs a hand through his hair, frustrated, distressed, the exact opposite of the picture that he was several hours ago. “He has to completely exhaust himself in order to even be able to try, and he wakes up early, so it all cancels out. He barely gets three hours a night.” 

The science of gaining back their bodies is still something new to Winry; even to Ed and Al, it seems. They discussed it briefly before she bowed out for the night, but that might have been the part of the narrative that they were still having trouble parsing. It’s not everyday that you gain back a body you left behind. She doesn’t know how rules of aging or preservation apply. 

“And what about the chills?” she goes on, trying to figure it out in her own mind. 

Ed furrows his brow. “I don’t know; side effect, I guess, or a co-symptom of the fatigue.” She’s the primary medical reference of their trifecta, and maybe he’s hoping that speaking about it in her terms will alight something, but the medical scope of an automail engineer whose parents died when she was five only goes so far. Winry can walk a person through concepts of skin inflammation due to amputation, or the pain that comes with outgrowing an automail limb, but there’s not much she knows about the body as a whole beyond what any other person is taught. She’s read books for the most essential and helpful pieces of information, and left the heavy-duty reading outside of her scope for other professionals. 

For a moment, she almost considers asking why he didn’t bother consulting anyone in Central, but she knows better. Ed would track anyone down if it meant helping Al. 

Winry spares another glance at him, watching the way he holds the counter behind him in a vice-grip. He looked so eager to leave all of the baggage behind when he set foot on her doorstep earlier in the day, but baggage is something that runs after Ed no matter how hard he tries to escape it, and it shows. He wears the weight of his burdens on his face. 

“You stay up with him every night?” she asks suddenly. 

Ed blinks, shrugs. His gaze turns the other way. “I try to, most of the time.” 

As she walks over to him with his cup of tea in one hand, she uses the other to pry his fingers off of the countertop. He’s a head taller than her, and she has to tilt her face up just a fraction to meet his eyes. “Then, it’s a start.” He opens his mouth to protest, and she’s reminded of the night that he left for Kanama, when they stared each other down into silence. 

“You’re doing all you can for him,” Winry insists. There are crow’s feet at the corners of his narrowed eyes, and she could smooth them out with her fingers if he just loosened up enough not to flinch at someone else’s touch. Back in the room, when she stirred him to wakefulness, she felt the small jerk of his shoulders, imperceptible at large but noticeable to her after a lifetime of bearing witness. He’s shakier than he was when he left her. 

Ed mutters, “It’s not enough,” gently pushing past her. “I’ve been doing all that I can for five years, and it’s still not enough. He’s stuck like this because of me.” There’s that tinge of despair in his voice, and it takes her back to the first time she saw him without limbs, when he hardly had a body to hold him up but all he could do was ask for his brother, for Alphonse, for the last person he had left. 

They’ve circled back to this conversation time and time again over the years, and it’s never gotten any easier. She supposes this is worse, in comparison, because getting back their bodies was supposed to solve all problems. 

“You’re brothers,” she says. “That decision is one the two of you made together. It’s not all on you, Ed.” 

“Well, I gave him the idea, didn’t I?”

“And he could have said ‘no’, but he didn’t.” 

“He was a child!” 

“ _You_ were a child!” 

They’ve found themselves on either side of the kitchen table now, Ed seated across and glaring up at her in defiance as she slams her hands down on the surface. It’s not so much that Ed is intent on taking the larger share of the blame to invoke self pity; his anger stems from a place of genuine disgust. 

He played the parent, and he failed, and the lack of an atonement he deems worthy in his eyes eats away at him every day. He’s wearier for it, though he’s only sixteen. 

Winry sighs, drawing a hand across her temple and back into her hair. Ed leans back in his seat and grumbles something under his breath. His fingers absentmindedly toy with the cup of tea she offered him earlier, and he looks at her out of the corner of his eye, as if anticipating her next outburst. 

There’s a tension between them worn by years of implicit trust stretched thin as a wire. He trusts her, she trusts him. It’s worked for them. It’s made bearing the distance easier. 

But the problem with proximity is that it brings the two of them too close to each other’s problems; there’s a heightened awareness Winry has of him when he’s at arm’s length, and it gives her all the opportunity to finally scrutinize him like she would one of her automail limbs in the workshop. They’re not made to be angry at each other, but it’s easier to worry when the reasons for doing so are in front of your eyes, and Winry does. She worries all the time. 

Ed looks like he’s in no mood to utter another word, so she takes the reins herself and crosses over to the other side of the table. He startles as she pushes him a little to the side and pulls out a chair, then spreads a notebook from her pocket open on the tabletop. 

“Okay, look.” 

Winry scribbles notes into a blank page, labels parts of the margin with dates and Al’s name and other shorthand only she can understand. It’s not lost on her that Ed peers curiously over her shoulder, and she takes him by surprise again when she whirls around to finish her thought.

“The crux of it is alchemy, right? But the effects are medical.” At this, she draws two circles onto the paper, a crude stick figure standing in the middle of each one. “It’s like when you lost your arm and leg, on top of Al’s body, but maybe it’s something in the reverse. Maybe pulling him out cost more than you bargained for, and you weren’t aware of it.” Ed’s lips downturn in a frown as she draws an assortment of arrows in between the figures, but he doesn’t contest her, and it’s a good sign, she thinks, considering how ludicrous it all feels coming out of her mouth. 

“So the doctors in Central don’t know what to make of it,” Winry says, challenging him, “it’s not like you’ve ever relied on anyone else to make your own ground. You’re Edward Elric. You know the rules better than anyone.” She jabs him lightly in the chest with her pointer finger for emphasis, and a small smile finally escapes him. 

“Tell me something,” he says, just a little bemused, “do you actually believe half of what you’re saying?” 

Winry makes a sound in her throat. She can’t answer that. She’ll slam her hands down on the table again if he manages to still worm his way out of this conversation. Her cheeks flush, and she snaps back, “Why does it matter whether or not I believe what I’m saying? My point is you’ve achieved the impossible, and you can do it again. I’ll help you! I’ll read medical textbooks again!” 

Ed breaks out into cacophonous laughter, the sound of it ringing throughout the whole house in a way that instantly quells her unease. She can never be too angry at him when he’s laughing at her. He sounds better that way. Happy, whole. 

She manages a small pout as he holds onto her shoulders, anchoring himself before the tremors of his body can send him clattering to the floor. He still hasn’t told her whether he finds worth in her nonsensical theory, and not that that was the point of her trying to boost his morale anyway, but she’d like to know that her opinion counts for something in his brain, outside of the maintenance essentials. “So?” she asks, trying to put on her most serious face. “Are we doing this or what?” 

Ed looks back at her, contemplating. Their chairs are flush with each other at this point, her smaller frame cradled in his larger one. Winry waits and holds his stare evenly, expectant. 

“I—”

“Doing what?” 

He tears himself away all at once, chair wobbling underneath him before it finally settles with a rattle. Ed blinks, cheeks tinged pink, before leveling a mothering look at his younger brother, who’s just entered the room and broken the reverie. 

“It hasn’t even been three hours yet,” he chides, walking over to him. Al leans on him for support, crutch wedged under his other arm. He offers a weak smile to Winry, and she rises from the table, unsure of how to approach. It wasn’t as apparent yesterday, when they were all smiles and strong laughter lines. He’s frail, and bony. 

Ed catches her eye as he moves Al into the vacant seat, and she turns the other way, quickly wiping away a tear. The past five years have been ones where her efforts were mostly spent on one brother. The mechanics of automail were easier to understand than a soul sealed into a suit of armor, and Al resigned himself to that more than anyone. His condition is one he largely learned about alone, in the quiet hours at night when no one else was awake or around. 

But Winry remembers that fateful day—perched on a burning hill, tears streaking down her cheeks as Ed smiled at her in solace and Al watched the flames ascend—and she thinks they’ve come a long way. There’s plenty that she still has to offer them by way of comfort, let alone medical expertise, and this path is one that all three of them have charted together, days and distance aside. 

When Ed comes around to her left and they start making breakfast together, the light past the window barely signaling daybreak, she makes a promise to herself. To him. To Al. And then she turns to him and murmurs resolutely—

“We’re doing it.” 

**Author's Note:**

> The conditions of Al's body after Ed retrieves it really intrigue me. We know that part of Ed's energy is used to sustain the connection of Al's soul to his body beyond the Gate, so that it's retrievable at all (or at least, that's my understanding), but we don't really know the reasons behind why Al's body didn't completely decay in the five years that it wasn't in any use or maintained by any physical sustenance. Admittedly, I didn't actually have much of an idea of how to tackle that when I started this fic, but by the end of it, I thought, what if maintenance of the body beyond the Gate is also something for which there is a price to pay? What if that price is muscular atrophy, weakened bodily conditions, exhaustion, insomnia, etc. Essentially, a sort of all-encompassing illness, with no real idea as to whether or not it can be overcome. And then that idea kind of segued into my desire to see Winry and Ed put their heads together to research something, and how that might tie into Winry's resolve when it comes to the Elric brothers in general, so we ended up here. It's a mess, I'm aware, and my brain is totally fried—but hopefully it made sense.


End file.
